Posted
by
timothyon Friday June 10, 2011 @12:16PM
from the breathless-pursuit-works-best-if-anaerobic dept.

Velcroman1 writes "The quest for the elusive Higgs boson seemed over in April, when an unexpected result from an atom smasher seemed to herald the discovery of the famous particle — the last unproven piece of the physics puzzle and one of the great mysteries scientists face today.
Scientists with the Tevatron particle accelerator at Chicago's Fermilab facility just released the results of a months-long effort by the lab's brightest minds to confirm the finding. What did they find? Nothing. 'We do not see the signal,' said Dmitri Denisov, staff scientist at Fermilab. 'If it existed, we would see it. But when we look at our data, we basically see nothing.'"

If it exists where people are looking for it, it will confirm certain current theories. If it doesn't exist where people are looking, it damages certain current theories. If it doesn't exist at all, it calls for a complete rethink on many things.

Basically, if the Higgs Boson exists where people think it does, it means our ideas about how the universe is constructed are well founded and once again science has provided evidence to back up its theories. If it doesn't, then that opens up doors for radical rethinks on those ideas, meaning possible new directions in which to go and new theories to seek evidence for.

Perhaps some aspects of current physical science need to be re-visited? Like maybe the Euclidean point that was the initial state of the universe was not a point at all? Maybe there is no need for a Higgs Boson?

Some aspects of current science always need to be re-visited, and science in general isn't touchy about doing so.

There may not be a need for Higgs Boson as you suggest, but the current theories suggest that there is - which is why its being looked for. No one has yet come up with a credible alternative that doesn't first throw out the entire current model, and quite honestly its currently cheaper to spend the money looking for the Higgs Boson than it is recreating the entire current model from scratch and coming up with evidence to support the change.

But the chance that the Higgs Boson might not exist is not a reason not to look for it - because looking for it will either prove it does exist, or that it doesn't exist where we thought it did. Both outcomes are beneficial, and just because we didn't find it doesnt mean the money was wasted - the fact that it wasn't where we thought it was is great science in itself, because it brings new data to the table.

Plus of course the chance that other discoveries may be made during the hunt for the Higgs Boson.

The data might be there, but you just sent thousands of scientists off on a theoretical goose hunt and cast doubt on every large scale experiment currently running.

Data already gathered might not cost anything, but the effort to come up with a new model which fits the current data plus the new results which invalidated the old data might cost billions of dollars in time and further experimentation. Or it might result in a small tweak over a couple of days.

The data might be there, but you just sent thousands of scientists off on a theoretical goose hunt and cast doubt on every large scale experiment currently running.

No I didn't. I started with one guy, or a couple guys that get a flash of inspiration over a beer, or a handful at a weekend BBQ or a conference. You're correct in assuming there is unlikely to be a large scale assault - you're incorrect in assuming that's the only possible route.

Riiight - because every scientist in the world instantly gets together and decides precisely which small group of them owns the problem, and the rest of them leave it alone? No.

It may end with a flash of inspiration at a BBQ, but it certainly doesn't wouldn't start there. The moment a major theory is invalidated, every scientist working on a research project is going to investigate as to how its going to affect them, and many will work on the problem themselves.

The elegant standard model of particle physics only works because the particles don't have intrinsic mass (they get their mass from coupling to the higgs field). This allows a symmetry between the three "families" of particles (electron/muon/tau, neutrino/mu neutrino/tau neutrino, up/strange/top, down/charm/bottom etc.)

So if there is no Higgs boson then we're certainly missing something. I'm not sure if it's possible for the Higgs field to exist and not carry particles; certainly you'd normally expect for p

First, to be clear: the Fermilab people haven't shown that the Higgs boson doesn't exist. They just didn't find it.

If the LHC doesn't find it, then we can start saying it doesn't exist. That would pretty much invalidate the standard model [stackexchange.com] of particle physics, which is the currently best-accepted theory we have (because it gets most things right). If the standard model is wrong, it opens the door for other physical theories [stackexchange.com] to be considered. Right now we're not taking those other theories so seriously because they all get one thing or another wrong, but if the standard model is also wrong about the Higgs, then there's no particular reason to favor it over other theories that also get one or two things wrong.

Can the LHC team fake it? Certainly they can, but it would be a complex fabrication - if their results showed that the HB fell outside of the limit of anything other than the LHC then independent verification would be impossible until another collider in the LHCs class could be constructed to run the same tests. In the mean time, as support for their findings, the LHC team would be pressed to release the raw data from the collisions - terabytes of data that would ne

Falsifiability [wikipedia.org] is when you describe an experiment that would show your theory to be false. Falsifiability is a requirement of a valid hypothesis. Gravity would be falsified by showing that objects with mass didn't accelerate towards each other - if you could show that, you disprove gravity. Evolution is falsified by watching a species spring from nothing. Creationism can't be falsified because "it's all God" - anything that happens that you didn't expect, God could've done - which is why creationism isn't science.

It's not about fabrications or hoaxes. The GP's question (I hope) is whether somebody could construct an experiment that shows that the boson *doesn't* exist, at least not as we understand it.

Yes, it is expected to be in a certain mass range, have a certain spin (zero), a certain electric charge (zero), a certain color (none - "color" refers to strong force charge), and so on. The LHC can sample all the "places" it is expected to be, and can prove it doesn't exist. Now, of course, somebody can come after that with a different theory, with a different particle and name it after Higg.

I'm way behind on this discussion but it looks like people are misinterpreting this report. The CDF experiment at Fermilab had reported last April on a possible observation of a new particle. They say that it is *not* a Higgs candidate, but could be something else (even more startling than a Higgs, such as a supersymmetric particle). Something with a mass of about 140 MeV/c^2 appears to be decaying into W and two quarks. This report is here: http://www.fnal.gov/pub/today/archive_2011/today11-04-07.html [fnal.gov]

Currently, things weigh more than they should. The mass of a particle is a function of the kinetic energy of the particle and it's component parts, if any. If we run the numbers, we get good masses for some particles, not good masses for others. A proposed solution to this problem is the Higgs field, a nonzero field that permeates space. Anything coupling with this field gains additional mass through interaction with the field.

Picture a person at a party. Normally, they are free to move through the party fairly easily. Now make that person famous. Admirers flock around, and the celebrity has trouble moving. Nonfamous people are particles that do not couple with the HIggs field. Celebrities are particles that do couple with the field, surrounded by a paparazzi of virtual Higgs particles.

Nice theory. It fills a gap in the standard model and now the math all works. So now we have to find the particle. You need the mass of a particle to find it in an accelerator. Roughly (very roughly), you need to create collisions where the sum energy of the little explosion is about that of the particle in question, then watch a statistically large number of those to see if something matching your particle appears. If it does, it's off to Stockholm for dinner with the king. If not, it's back to the drawing boards.

The problem is, the theory doesn't predict the mass of the particle. It doesn't even say if it is one particle, a family of similar particles or a family of different particles. So there's a wide spread of masses to examine. And all the masses are really high, far higher than any other existing accelerator could reach. So we have the new CERN experiment, slowly scanning the possible masses, looking for the particle.

If we don't find that particle, then we're back to square one, why are some particles heavier than predicted? For decades, we've assumed it was some sort of variant of the Higgs boson. But if that's not the case, it's back to the blackboard for more theories.

In general, this is a problem for particle physics. Finding or not finding the particle will affect chemistry, biology and general astronomy not at all. It might or might not have an affect on cosmology, but that's hard to say without a particle to talk about. More interesting for cosmology is that while searching for the Higgs, the experiment might come across more esoteric things, such as evidence for supersymmetry. Evidence for supersymmetry would automatically generate the prime number one candidate for dark matter. And nailing down the properties of dark matter would give us another probe of the Big Bang.

Picture a person at a party. Normally, they are free to move through the party fairly easily. Now make that person famous. Admirers flock around, and the celebrity has trouble moving. Nonfamous people are particles that do not couple with the HIggs field. Celebrities are particles that do couple with the field, surrounded by a paparazzi of virtual Higgs particles.

Suppose you have car and emperically you figure out how to drift it into many different turns. In certain configurations, you notice a certain amount of differential side-slip and you collect data. You make a theory about drifting based on various combinations of tires (particles), and road surface types (fields). One thing that you notice is that you don't really know why there's certain side-slip angles with different treads, so you propose a theory that the coupling between the tires and the road surface is different between these situations and that affects the skid dynamics (apparent mass), that you experience. Okay now you have this great theory and a bunch of empirical data of skid dyanmics that works for you by assigning magic number (masses) to various combination tires and surface types.

But you wonder if you can find a way to predict the dynamics and you come up with this idea that this coupling is a fundamental relationship of the coupling between tires and road surfaces (kinda like friction). Your theory is that there is some interaction between the tire and road which is like "friction" caused by the tread design and tire deformation amount. So you devise an experiment to see if you can find the thing causing this "friction".

The higgs field is analgous "friction" and the search for the higgs-boson is analagous to the search for the source of friction. If you think of friction being caused by atomic forces, there is some range of forces that can cause the macroscopic changes in skid dynamics that you see empirically. Likewize with Higgs, the higgs-boson need to be found in a certain range of collision energy if it is consistant with the standard model to match the empirical data of obverved mass and coupling constants up to Planck scale energies (where gravity is more quantized and mass probably has different physics).

If we find the thing that causes atomic forces that is consistant with our theory of "friction" (with say the tread design, or say the tire deformation amount), then probably something else explains the skid dynamics that isn't "friction", but something else. So we have to determine by experiment what the skid dynamics are for each tire and road combination. Likewize, with w/o Higgs we are struggling to have a theory of mass, but that doesn't mean mass (and the resultant dynamical behaviour) doesn't exist, just we don't know why it exists and can't predict it from known theories.

The LHC is, basically, looking for particles (the Higgs boson in particular). They look for them by colliding other particles together at very specific energies and looking at the results. There are lots of different theorised Higgs bosons, each of which would appear at a different energy level- so they're busy colliding things at all the relevant energy levels to see which one (if any) yields the Higgs. One run of the experiment at a certain energy level thought it

I would agree, except no one expects that the Tevatron can generate a particle collision high enough in energy to show evidence of the Higgs Boson. It was one of the primary reasons that the LHC was built in the first place.

The Tevatron not being able to find the Higgs is in the science community largely uninteresting. Now if the LHC doesn't see it then it may border on the realm of "unexpected" but even that means that the Higgs may not be present only at those energy levels. This would cast serious doubt

> I doubt you can collide subatomic particles in a controlled environment in your backyard.

Of course I can. That's where I keep my old dryer. I have long hypothesized that the Higgs Boson is responsible for the disappearance of my socks... it is an interesting particle, ineffective against sock/antisock pairs, leaving unpaired socks in its wake, explaining the unaccounted for shortage of antisocks in the universe.

Why do you suppose it is that whenever there's a science related story posted to slashdot, it's always followed by a link to foxnews with some hyperbolic title like "Heartbreaker: Major Setback in Quest for God Particle"?

When they don't find it at Fermilab, and they don't find it at the LHC, they'll just say we haven't got enough power yet, and we need to build another one with even more power.

The Higgs doesn't exist. The arguments for it sound just like the arguments of the 'ether' back in the 1900's. The standard model is wrong. Go back and fix it with pen and paper before spending a few trillion dollars trying to figure out why scientists can't do math.

And of course you can provide evidence to back your assertion that the entire thing needs a rethink? Just from your comment, I'd rather give these scientists billions of dollars for the LHC than give you $10 for lunch.

What would count as good evidence that the standard model has a big flaw in it? When people started thinking the epicycle model was wrong, it happened for several reasons (paraphrasing Thomas Kuhn for much of this): By Copernicus' time, 1) there were a lot of accumulated observations that no one had during the first few hundred years, and new tools made those latter observations more accurate. 2) The formulas to calculate epicycles grew more and more complex to account for those

You ignore that the epicycle model is asymptotically true. Enough corrections and any theory would be as true as any other theory. The problem was that the epicycle model was not parsimonious and there was a vastly simpler way to describe the dynamics of bodies acting under the influence of gravity.

There's an opinion that the standard model and the variety of proposed corrections to it isn't parsimonious. But it's not based on scientific evidence.

If anything, this just shows me the way science should work. An assertion is taken, tested impartially and if found wanting it's discarded without a second thought. No emotion, no hysterics. Just science.

You know how they "fixed" the ether? It wasn't with pen and paper, it was by thinking about the implications, then doing the experiments (in particular, michaelson-morely), and then looking at the results. The same thing they're doing now with the Higgs.

I don't think the Higgs exists either. But it's the best candidate explanation for observed phenomena. There is an upper limit on the mass of a standard model Higgs, and testing in the relevant range is reasonable; even if we don't find the Higgs, we'll like

Actually not. Naively explained so you can understand it, the Higgs mechanism to work needs a Higgs mass between 114 GeV upwards to ~170 GeV. Outside of that region things don't work and it's safe to say you have to look for better ideas.

The reason why physicist think the Higgs boson is there it's because 3/4th of the idea has already been discovered, the W^+ , W^- and Z bosons. What is left of the picture is that 1/4 which correspondes to the Higgs in the electroweak theory. If there is supersymmetry there might be 5 Higgs bosons which would make the discovery of each of them a little bit more difficult. But hopefuly feasable in the LHC.

If you let me, I would give an analogy*. Think of you trying to solve a puzzle, a very complicated one indeed. After years of work you manage to assambly a consistent arrangement of all the pieces that not only fits, also gives a pretty picture. All there's to find a piece that you lost somewhere in the room to put it in it's place. At this point you are pretty confident that the chances of it not fitting are small, and that you got it right. But physicist don't take this for granted, they wan't to find the piece and prove it. And if it doesn't fit, don't worry, we will work on the puzzle again.

And what pray tell is the "right" math? There's kazillions of mathematical models, but only one that that actually fits reality - though simplifications can cover specific parts like Newtonian physics. You can't know if your model is accurate without testing. In fact, without observation you can't even guess at a model at all. That sometimes we think we know what's out there in the unknown is the rare exception to when we don't. If we're just going to sit around and think about it, we'll get no further than

You really can't know that there's even a single mathematical model that fits reality. Yes, it looks that way so far, but it's a starting axiom of science that there will be one and only one. It would be a very odd universe indeed if there were zero or more than one, but science doesn't reason its way to proving there is only one, science starts from that as a default assumption. Reasoning this to be true is a matter of philosophy, which can argue from axioms completely outside of science that math is not j

As long as there's some sanity in what applies where, disjoint models would be put into one. That's how it works without a theory of everything, we have models for the various forces that in their limited scope seem correct. And there's nothing saying the laws of the universe must be constant either in time or in space, just that there's some form of pattern we can describe. And I would say there's at least a partial pattern or we'd not have all the models we do have. Even probabilities like quantum mechani

What I'd like to know (and it may be known, but what I know about this is from following it on Slashdot:-) is whether there exists (in theory at least) a disconfirming experiment for the Higgs Boson. Or is the only way to "prove" it doesn't exist is just to never find it.

When they don't find it at Fermilab, and they don't find it at the LHC, they'll just say we haven't got enough power yet, and we need to build another one with even more power.

1) The Standard Model predicts that the Higgs will be found within a specific energy range. The LHC is powerful enough to explore that entire range. Therefor if the LHC does not find the Higgs it does not exist.

2) Finding the Higgs is not the purpose of the LHC. It's merely one experiment.

Unfortunately, unless they give the particles crazy names and describe the observations in certain ways, there won't be funding to perform more observations in different (in this case, high energy) environments.

The universe is not required to work they way you want it too. There really may be 17 or more "constants" without explanation. There is no reason to expect otherwise. We may hope otherwise, but that is not the same thing.

The universe has no obligation to reducible/explained to/by some "elegant model".

"So what was it, anyway? Something completely unknown and unexpected, Denisov said, which is what prompted Fermilab to drop everything and assign its top scientists to uncover an unfortunate truth: Someone forgot to carry a zero."

"I'm pretty confident that towards the end of 2012 we will have an answer to the Shakespeare question for the Higgs boson, to be, or not to be?" Rolf-Dieter Heuer, director general of CERN, said at Britain's Royal Society."

Id be perfectly okay if you wait until 2013 to get your answers. Its not that I believe all these December 22,2012 things its just thatsome idiot who forgot to carry their zero might be stupid enough to rush something and accidentally cause some sort of catastrophe. Lets all justshut down all the accelerators on December 14th,2012 and give everyone a holiday until January 7th, 2013.

Sorry, the summary and title is just plain incorrect. This announcement has nothing to do with the Higgs.

A few months ago, CDF claimed that they detected a new particle which could not be the higgs, but was speculated to be a new particle. As explained here [science20.com], it wasn't possible for the new particle to be the Higgs.

Today DZERO announced that they did not see any signal where CDF claimed to see one. So one of the two projects has an error in their analysis.

Today DZERO announced that they did not see any signal where CDF claimed to see one. So one of the two projects has an error in their analysis.

Maybe the first party happened to observe a set of statistically anomalous events, which didn't re-occur when the second party looked into it. Like if I visited the desert for one day and it happened to rain, I might say, "we have reason to suspect this may be a wet climate," but as more people spent more days there trying to replicate my findings they would find

Well in this case it is not so much direct observation as trying to sort thru a whole lot of detected particles. Kinda like deciding to find one specific jigsaw piece in the box by sorting thru snapshots of the content of the box being tossed across the room. And while doing that they notice what looks like a 5th corner piece in what should be a square puzzle.

This comment should be emphasized. The summary and title are way off the mark.
1. This was not a data "review," but rather an entirely new analysis. Fermilab has two experiments that study proton-antiproton collisions, named CDF and D0. CDF published the original paper, and then D0 tried to verify their claims. Reproducibility of results is a tenet of science; having multiple ~independent experiments at Fermilab allows results from one experiment to be verified at another. This story demonstrates exactly w

Let's get things straightened out. About a month ago the CDF experiment at the Tevatron at Fermilab found a "bump" in their data. It was statistically significant and was unexplained. This "bump" cannot be the Higgs boson from The Standard Model because it has the completely wrong cross-section. This was a fully public result from the CDF experiment.

About the same time there was a "leaked" abstract from an internal note from the ATLAS experiment at the LHC which claimed to have a signal for a Higgs boso

The summary *could* mention that "an atom smasher" was the LHC at CERN... for some reason we need to know that the lab checking the data was Fermilab, that Fermilab has the Tevatron particle accelerator and that Fermilab is in Chicago but we don't need to know the name, location or equipment of the lab conducting the actual experiment.

Hint: It's ok to acknowledge that important stuff happens outside the US.

If I remember some stuff I read a couple of months back, this bump on the tail of this particular distribution was seen in data taken at the CDF detector but *not* at D-Zero, which is a similar, complimentary detector on the other side of Fermilab's collider ring. So I suppose this isn't that big of a surprise. And now one supposes that LHC is back to being the only game in town for the Higgs.

Sad in a way. Does this mean Fermilab will be ramped down and decommissioned before long?